The Tigers

On the first day of the 1999 Kosovo War, while the bombs were falling onto Serbia, commander of 98th Aviation regiment, colonel Sreto Malinović, held a short speech for the pilots of 241st squadron “Tigers”, which will one day probably go into history textbooks. After the speech he sat behind the commands of one of the aircrafts and led the formation of “Orao’s” in action against the terrorist’s positions in Kosovo.This is just one of many stories about the “Tigers”. Sadly, these stories about the heroic actions of defenders of our country are not welcome by the politicians in these years, and they are slowly slipping into forget. During the ’99 war members of this squadron had the most flight hours and were involved in numerous combat missions. In one such mission colonel Života Đurić, the commander of the squadron from that period lost his life.Today, 241st Fighter-bomber squadron “Tigers”, is the only “attack” squadron in ViPVO (Serbian Air Force), with the primary mission of close air support to the ground units. It is a part of 98th Airforce brigade stationed at the airbase Lađevci, near Kraljevo. “Tigers” fly the domestically produced aircrafts, attack aircraft J/NJ-22 “Orao” (Eagle ) and trainer/light-attack G-4 “Super Galeb” (Super Seagull).During the past few years, I had opportunity to photograph “Tigers” at several occasions. Some of that photos you could see in the issues of magazine “Odbrana” and other publications, some of them on the various forums and just few on my blog. This is my chance to compensate that, I hope you’ll enjoy about 40 handpicked photos in this blog post…